From Mama Shep to Baby Grunt
by Aurora Musis Amica
Summary: The beginning of the third year of a krogan's life is marked by the rite of mobility – teaching them to ride. Except Grunt is a bit more developed than the average krogan child, so an appropriate challenge has to be found. Shepard hatches a daring plan: They're going to ride a thresher maw. (Crack, minor FemShepxWrex)


Wrex blinked at the human female, trying to decide if she was serious or not. Her face looked as it always did – he was good at reading humans, but Shepard was something else. He'd seen her crack a smile at the face of danger that would send normal squishies running for cover. He'd seen her face down certain death without so much as a twitch of her lips.

Shepard's lips were twitching now. She had to be joking. She had to. The mental image came to him unbidden but welcome. A saddle, slung over a thrashing Thresher Maw, riding harness drilled into its carapace. An absolutely hillarious joke, he thought, breaking into laughter. She joined him, sounding nothing like a delicate human. Grunt, at her side, clapped his hands and grinned even broader.

"Shepard!" He managed to get out between the kips of laughter. "That was the best joke I've heard all year."

They laughed in good camraderie a while longer, then she straightened and put a hand on his shoulder.

"Sorry Wrex, it's not a joke. I am going to need some help to set it up, though."

He turned his head sideways to peer at her. She looked serious. Amused, but serious.

"It's..." he shook his body, trying to make sense of this. Shepard _hated_ Thresher Maws, with the fury of a thousand suns. He'd heard the tales of Akuze, and the extermination-expeditions she'd been on following that. "It's not a joke?" he said, just to check his hearing.

"No joke. You said yourself, the beginning of the third year of a Krogan's life is marked by the rite of mobility – teaching them to ride."

"...yeees, but..." he thumped his hump, trying to think of a way to explain this in human terms. "We teach them to ride _kong-rok_. They're stupid sedate horse-sized bugs. Our people used them as beast of burden for millennia when we were nomadic. Teaching the pups to ride used to be a matter of _survival,_" he stressed the word, "because a female Krogan cannot do what humans do and carry an entire litter. When the clan has to move, any pup that falls off their ride is left behind."

Wrex saw the gears moving in Shepard's head, but could tell it still was adding up to no good.

"But Grunt is a little bit more advanced than a regular 3-year-old." she said sensibly. Grunt bobbed his head eagerly, nearly ruining the effect.

Wrex snorted. "So he is. Missing the rite of mobility is not a detriment to his status in our clan."

"Still, I think it's important to him. He feels uneasy about his tank-bred status sometimes. Going through this rite would help."

Grunt snorted, but agreed.

Wrex stared at her. "...then we should find a big angry _kong-rok_ for him to ride?" he tried.

"It has to be an appropriate challenge."

"I still fail to see how that means _riding a THRESHER MAW!_"

The grin she gave him was one he'd seen on truly ancient Krogan, those who had stopped regenerating and were looking for that one, final battle to earn them their hero status.

"It'll be fun!"

Grunt laughed.

* * *

Even with Wrex's inevitable blessing (he never could say no to Shepard, and the only consolation was that he was hardly the only one) it took a few days to set up. An appropriate riding ground had to be found – one that actually had conveniently available thresher maws, and weren't anywhere near a construction site. Gear had to be acquired, and in the case of the saddle and reins built from scratch.

After some iteration on Shepard's part, and some practice on a few now very skittish _kong-rok_ acting as guineapigs by Grunt, they had dropped the idea of a 'saddle' altogether. Instead, she and Grunt had taken old but still good armor and installed jagged spikes with barbs along the inner and front legs. Walking was impossible without taking great care to not impale themselves, to Wrex's amusement. To the helmets they added plough-shaped metal to protect them (hopefully) when the Thresher Maw submerged. The 'reins' were similarly added spikes on their arms, and they both carried barbed spears with a forearm's length long tip, to be driven into the hide of the Thresher Maw. For backup, their omni-tools had been reprogrammed to provide a very good set of holographic clasps.

And finally, a gong for attracting the beast of the hour was dragged out to the chosen spot. They'd picked the site specifically for its soft soil, and Bakara had noted with good humour that even if they were to die, the Thresher Maws digging through the soil would make it further ideal for future farm land. And thus, Wrex had lost his one ally who could have possibly talked Shepard out of this madness. On the tail end of that thought, he wondered when he'd turned _old_.

Grunt was so excited on the big day that he ate a double-sized breakfast, and was skipping around like a Salarian on Hallex for hours. He even grinned and bounced when Shepard volunteered to drive the truck, but Wrex claimed that honour by right of being clan chief and if there was history to be made, he would have at least _some_ part in it. (That didn't involve burying what was left of the body of his greatest sister, the bravest of her kind.)

So, there they were, standing on an endless plain under the gazing sun of Tuchanka. Shepard was doing a last check on Grunt's suit, with Wrex looking over hers. He tugged the spikes on her inner thighs to make certain they were thoroughly attached, earning him a loving elbow in his stomach. Still...

"Shepard." he said when she finally deemed Grunt ready to go.

"Wrex?"

"Do this thing, then come back alive. I can't rebuild my planet without you."

She rapped her knuckled against his plates. "Sure you can. It'd just take you longer."

"Hmph. You know what I mean."

"I know." She turned to Grunt and rapped her knuckles against his plates too, though far more playfully than she'd done with him. "Ready to PLAY?!"

"Yes Battlemaster!"

"Yeah! Wrex, strike the gong, then get the hell outta here." They hefted the spears and stood ready when he activated the gong and started towards the truck. That's when he realised something was wrong. Badly wrong. The ground was shaking. A Thresher Maw was coming, but the quakes were far too... big.

"It's a huge one!" Grunt exclaimed excitedly. Shepard whooped.

Wrex hurried towards the truck. "That's KALROS, you fools!"

"Even better, she knows me."

He slammed the door and hit the speed, making high ground just in time to see the Mother of all Thresher Maws glide along the ground like a shark under water. Shepard punched Grunt on the back, and he flung himself towards the roaring, upheaving earth. At first it looked like he had missed, becoming lost among the dirt, but then Wrex spotted him, hanging with on one arm that had firmly driven in the spear into Kalros' impressive carapace. In a feat likely unique to Krogan, he twisted his entire upper body by arm-strength alone and sank the other spear in deep. Kalros may not have felt his insignificant weight, but she certainly noticed an arm's length of metal in her hide. Her shriek of fury reverberated through Wrex' body.

Still thrashing past the gong, she began a deep dive into the ground, and Wrex nearly missed Shepard's jump to attach herself. She had more grace and timing than Grunt, plastering herself flat against an upraised portion of Kalros as it dove past her, using the spikes on her legs for leverage before sinking her spears in deep.

Kalros screamed, then dove. And they were gone.

The ground's quakes continued unabated, sometimes closer, sometimes further, but remaining near the surface. Wrex brought up his omni-tool, trying to track them. Their armours appeared on his HUD, but the tracking was not very good, skipping ahead several paces at the time, then winking out, only to appear elsewhere a moment later. Then again, if tracking Thresher Maws was easy...

He felt the change in the ground beneath him, even before his omni-tool started panicking at him and he dove away from the truck in time to see it be knocked over by surfacing Kalros.

Followed by...

...laughter. Absolutely Krogan from-the-belly full volume laughter. Grunt's. Wrex watched Kalros rise above the ground like a snake preparing to strike, then _shake_ her forward body to divest herself of the nuisance clinging to her carapace. Grunt held on, his laughters becoming delighted squeals every time Kalros changed direction of her mighty swings.

For a moment, Wrex thought he was about to become collateral damage as she faced him, but a second later she was crashing into the ground again, to rid herself of her riders by scraping them off her in the dirt. She dug and thrashed, and he finally caught sight of Shepard, further down her body. Her grip was weakened, one leg free, a spear gone. He saw the flickering lights of her omni-tool.

"Shepard!"

Whether she heard him or not was unclear, but he charged forward into the spray of rocks and earth and managed, by some astronomically unlikely feat of luck, to catch her as she was flung at high speed from Kalros' body, sending them both tumbling. Flat on the ground, they were nearly buried in dirt when Kalros dove down again.

"Shepard?" he asked, holding her head carefully still. Humans were so damn fragile. He needn't have worried though, for a moment later her eyes opened and she was grinning broadly.

"That! Was AWESOME!"

He found himself laughing, then hauling her unceremoniously onto his shoulder and walking towards the truck. Kalros was about to return, and he felt no compelling need to be in her way.

* * *

With some help from Shepard, he managed to get the truck turned upright again, and they sat on its hood, watching Grunt and Kalros appear and disappear again on the plain below. The manical laughter was all the proof he needed to know that the tank-bred was not only still alive, but having the most memorable day ever. Considering he would, barring early death, have at least another thousand years to go, that was setting the bar rather high for the rest of his life.

Shepard was in the process of removing the spikes from the armor, and he could see her move through the pain her body was no doubt feeling. Her helmet was off, and her hair was streaked with dirt and sweat.

She looked as glorious as she had the day she cured the genophage.

She noticed him looking, and bonked her head against his shoulder, then left it there with a small, "Ow".

He laughed and patted her hair, then pointed at the ground below, where Grunt had (finally) gotten off the ride. The quakes were subsiding, the Mother of all Thresher Maws returning to the depths of Tuchanka.

"Battlemaster!" He called.

"Grunt!" she yelled in return.

"That was fun! Lets do it again!"


End file.
